Real-time Malaria Parasite Screening in Thick Blood Smears for Low-Resource Setting

Date

2020-06-01

Author

Chibuta, Samson
Acar, Aybar Can

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Malaria is a serious public health problem in many parts of the world. Early diagnosis and prompt effective treatment are required to avoid anemia, organ failure, and malaria-associated deaths. Microscopic analysis of blood samples is the preferred method for diagnosis. However, manual microscopic examination is very laborious and requires skilled health personnel of which there is a critical shortage in the developing world such as in sub-Saharan Africa. Critical shortages of trained health personnel and the inability to cope with the workload to examine malaria slides are among the main limitations of malaria microscopy especially in low-resource and high disease burden areas. We present a low-cost alternative and complementary solution for rapid malaria screening for low resource settings to potentially reduce the dependence on manual microscopic examination. We develop an image processing pipeline using a modified YOLOv3 detection algorithm to run in real time on low-cost devices. We test the performance of our solution on two datasets. In the dataset collected using a microscope camera, our model achieved 99.07% accuracy and 97.46% accuracy on the dataset collected using a mobile phone camera. While the mean average precision of our model is on par with human experts at an object level, we are several orders of magnitude faster than human experts as we can detect parasites in images as well as videos in real time.

Subject Keywords

Radiological and Ultrasound Technology, Radiology Nuclear Medicine and imaging, Computer Science Applications

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/63232

Collections

Graduate School of Informatics, Article